Where do we go from here...

Friday was Dynamis night again, and again attendance issues. I gotta tell you tho’ that I’m happy with the way Oakami has been handling things lately (Oak has become the new de facto run leader for NewDawn). We had cancelled the last 2 runs as chronicled in recent posts and I’ll admit it got my back up a bit. Nobody who knows me in real life would ever think I have a temper, but I do. I just don’t let it out to play much because it tends to play rough. Oak decided that he was NOT canceling a 3rd run in a row and I respect that. When it comes to end-game activities like Dynamis sheer perverse bloody-mindedness has a lot to recommend it. We decided to do Jeuno, but just as a farming run. For those that don’t know, a farming run is one where you do not go after the Mega-boss (going for the win), but instead are there just to get drops.

All in all the run went fairly well. Not much relic but we got plenty of currency which will pay for the run and hopefully the next one too. Fash again demonstrated his abilities to keep pulls reasonable (for the most part, Jeuno has some pulls that just can’t really be done clean) and so deaths were not bad. I honestly think that if we needed to we could have gotten the win, not easily but we could have done it. I even got some saleable drops, so it was a good run on a personal level.

The rest of the weekend was spent working on the mage jobs. In other words, noone showed for CoP runs. I got both red and black mage to 14 on Saturday morning, so I did a big inventory reshuffle early Saturday afternoon. I also got to do one of my least favorite activities, camping an NM. Since this is the 1st time I’ve done this since starting the blog I’ll detail it a bit for you, at least how I do it. I was camping an unpopular NM in West Sarutabaruta for a Pilgrim’s Wand, which allows the holder to recoup MP quicker than they otherwise can. This means that I had no competition and had a 100% chance of success on the drop, avoiding some of the annoyances of NM camping. Just to make the task a bit more annoying, I used to have one, but I tossed it when I believed Glam would never need to level a mage job again to make room. NMs have certain conditions that have to be satisfied to pop, which vary by NM, in this case a timed lottery pop. That means that I had to run around killing the placeholders until sufficient time had passed since its last pop. I used my 75 beastmaster for widescan, a great ability for camping NMs as it lets me see all the available mobs in range and to track them instead of just having to run in circles and hope I get lucky spotting the thing. Long story short, 3 hours and I finally got the thing.

So Sunday I started out shopping for spells I’m going to need until level 20, no biggie. I also organized my inventory so I can get gear as I level out of my satchel instead of having to go to town to change. I ran some FoV pages in the highlands and picked up 2 levels, but not without some difficulty. There was a series of high-level players passing through and they were killing the prey I needed for pages, I guess just because they could. Really aggravating when you are trying to keep up some kind of cycle that works with the game clock and the FoV timer. I eventually returned to Sandy, but forgot to speak to my Moogle as I’m eligible for the last Mog House expansion quest. Definitely need to get that done.

On an unrelated note, this was a big weekend in Wisconsin for veterans. There was a free flight to take a group of World War II vets to see the new WWII memorial in Washington, rather important as we are unfortunately losing those vets to age and age-related illnesses at an increasing rate, and we took so long making a national monument to that war. In addition, we had the moving wall (the traveling Vietnam Memorial) at Lambeau Field. I can’t go to that memorial personally. I saw the original in DC once. Both my father and my 1st step-father served in Vietnam and when you look at that immense wall it is all too easy to see where-but for a little luck-another 2 names could be resident on that wall. I break down every time I even think of it. My father is one of only 2 survivors from his Marine unit, the other being a quadruple amputee, my father had a grenade fragment skim his scalp. My step-father earned his Bronze Star in the battle of Danang when he stayed in his position for the entire night after his 2 closest friends had been killed sharing the same fortification, he was wounded but he held his position. Follow that up with my watching the latest episode of The Pacific and it was a big weekend for reflection.